Actually, it was more of a private joke—nobody ever interfered with a man who looked upset and was carrying a clipboard—than a practical disguise. Both of them knew full well that no sailor worthy of his hangover would board until three blasts after the final call. The passageways were deserted. There was clattering from what probably was a galley and some drunken snores from a berthing compartment, but nothing else.
Sten noted that the ship was very, very clean—freshly re-finished. Either it was run by a bully captain, or high-level passengers were expected.
They found the hatchways leading down to the hold and slid down the ladders. The hold was a little over half-full. The loadmaster and his assistants were bellowing instructions to the laden soldiers as to what went where and why the clot was doing it wrong.
Sten and Kilgour found a pile of not yet secured crates near the forward area of the hold, and Sten deployed a pry bar quietly.
The first crate held dinnerware—expensive dinnerware with the Tahn Council crest embossed on it. Sten thoughtfully opened more crates.
The sixth was the tip-off. It contained ceremonial robes made of a material that no Tahn would have seen for years and years. And each robe's left breast area was embroidered in gold and silver with a small three-headed dragon. Kilgour's eyes widened, and he applauded silently.
The crate's top was replaced, and Sten and Alex went back the way they came, dancing a pas de deux past the searchlights and guards.
Neither of them needed a short course in heraldry to know what that triple-headed dragon was. The natives of Cormarthen were too well known for carrying that emblem wherever their intransigence led them and for putting that emblem on everything, including, some theorized, their toilet paper.
So, as Sten had predicted, Fehrle was not going anywhere near Arbroath or the other supposed systems. But he—or some other muckety on the council—was making a grand tour. And Sten thought the Emperor might be vaguely interested in knowing what Fehrle's real itinerary appeared to be.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The eternal emperor was interested.
He just was not quite sure what to do about having the facts on Lord Fehrle's wanderings. Actually, he corrected himself, he knew quite well what to do about it. The problem was how to do it.
Damn, but he missed Mahoney. If the flaky Mick were still head of his Intelligence—Mercury Corps—the Emperor would merely have had to hint heavily. But his current intelligence chief happened to be a tolerably straightforward man.
Which meant too moral to be a good spy. Clot, he swore. Why'd I promote Mahoney?
The Eternal Emperor's fingers were on the decanter of stregg. They hesitated, then went to the concoction he called Scotch. He needed a bit of brainpower, not blind instinct.
Icing a fellow ruler was acceptable only in fiction—historical fiction. And even then it had better be hand to hand, the Emperor thought glumly. If Hank Doo had personally clunked Beckett with the nearest mace instead of sniveling about things to his clotpole court, he might have gotten a better press.
It was not that any politician found assassination morally abhorrent. But it made them nervous to think that the fellow across the negotiating table might actually take things personally. Killing millions of citizens was one thing—but wasting one of his own class? The boss class? Shameful, indeed.
After thought, the Emperor put the operation in motion. It never had a name nor any permanent fiche, even in the most classified files of the war.
The Emperor requested the specifications, to include the signature in all ranges from visual to output drive, of the most current Tahn battleships. Since Fehrle's profile showed that he liked to travel in style, he would use the newest, most modern class available—regardless of whether that ship would be better deployed in combat instead of being used for transportation.
Intelligence showed that the Tahn were building three new superbattleships. One was—?—in commission, one was in shakedown, and the third was nearing completion.
Mercury Corps technicians were given instructions to prepare a detonator that would explode the charge only when the active signature of that particular class of ship was within range. They had only days to build that detonator—Lord Fehrle's tour was almost ready to begin.
There was no problem. The technicians were—self-described—so used to doing the impossible with the improbable under circumstances that were preposterous that they felt capable of doing everything with nothing.
Explosive charges were prepared. Sixteen of them. The requirement was to provide a cased, nondeteriorating, small amount of explosive with the given classified detonator, capable of destroying a large object, such as a Tahn battleship, when it came within close range.
Sixteen was not an arbitrary choice. Cormarthen's capital port had sixteen pilot ships.
Mantis operatives were given those sixteen charges and inserted on Cormarthen.
All the pilot boats were booby-trapped, and the Mantis people withdrew without contact. They would have felt shamed if anything else had happened. They expressed no curiosity as to what was in the casing or what it was supposed to do and to whom at what date. They would find out—if the operation worked—in the privacy of their own bars or barracks. Very conceivably not until after the war ended.
The entire amount of "paperwork" on the operation against the ruler of the Tahn occupied one fiche. That fiche was hand delivered to the Eternal Emperor and destroyed. He then sent his Mercury computer experts back through the system, ensuring that there were no backup, ghost, or FYI copies of the fiche.
Satisfied, he poured himself a stregg and waited.
Lord Fehrle's battleship, the Conemaugh, cut AM2 drive power and, under Yukawa drive, closed on
Cormarthen. The ship's commander felt proud that his navigators had been able to pinpoint within 0.10 AU. Six ships were reported coming out-atmosphere: the pilot boat and appropriate escorts.
The commander so notified Lord Fehrle, who was in his cabin making final adjustments on one of the dragon-breasted robes he would wear.
While Fehrle's staff diplomats were on the com with the escort ships, the pilot craft closed to a forward lock without ceremony. On contact, the bomb went off.
Mercury demolition experts had planned for the blast to remove the entire nose section of the Tahn battleship. But because the Conemaugh was new, its fire-control circuits were still under test. Backup systems were not what they should have been. And so the blast ravened through the hull and then down into the drive system.
The AM2 fuel detonated.
The Conemaugh no longer existed—nor did the pilot boat, two of the approaching Cormarthen ships, and six of the Tahn warships escorting Lord Fehrle.
The Emperor, as he had promised some years earlier, was getting very personal about things.
BOOK FOUR
ZANSHIN
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
It was the Rangers versus the Blues in what every sports commentator in the Empire agreed was the gravball match of the decade. One hundred thousand beings were packed defecating organ to elbow in Lovett Arena to see if the homeplanet Rangers would revenge themselves on the dreaded Blues, who had whipped the Rangers for the gravball championship three E-years in a row. Despite the war, billions upon billions more—including, it was said, the Eternal Emperor himself—were watching the match on their home livie screens.